In the mid–nineteenth century in Pantelleria, Andrea I Pandolfo, great–grandfather of the current owner Gabriele, began to plant vines and to produce wines made from Zibibbo grapes.
In 1880, Andrea I sold the small vineyards in the island and bought 60 hectares of virgin land in northern Tunisia and precisely in Khanguet Gare, in Cape Bon.
The first vines were planted, the first grapes harvested and, at the early twentieth century, Andrea I and his son Giovanni started producing quality wines in their own winery, so that from the port of Tunis ships full of their wine to serve the best markets in France left.
In 1938, Andrea II, son of Giovanni, only sixteen years old, took over the company and continued with courage and effort to grow the reputation and the quality of the wines. But a terrible disease, phylloxera, arrived in Tunisia destroying all the vineyards of the company. The dry grapes were burned and the coal produced was sold in the market of Tunis.
They were very hard years. From France, the first resistant to disease grafted cuttings arrived, and the red and desolate lands began to color again of green vine leaves and generous bunches of grapes.
On 12th May 1964, the then President of Tunisia, Harbib Bourguiba, with an ordinance entered in the history, expropriated all the assets and properties of foreigners in Tunisia. Suddenly, all the work and sacrifices of a life were canceled and the Pandolfo family had to leave the country and divide between France and Italy. Andrea II, then 42–year–old, with his wife Elena and his sons decided to come to Italy to buy a small farm, the 1720 of Via Renibbio, near Terracina, to start again to work that hated and beloved land and to collect, with the harvest of 1968, the first grapes to make wine.
The first customers, the first bottles with handwritten labels, the first chestnut barrels and the winery started to enter among the first wine realities in the Pontine area. In 1976 he Andrea II Pandolfo died and his sons, flanked by their mother Elena, decided to continue the dream that had began 150 years before.
In this way, the "Sant’Andrea" company was founded, which reminds of the name of its founder. Currently, the company is run by Gabriele Pandolfo with his wife Enza, his son Andrea III and his sister–in–law Ornella; all aided by the constant and vigilant present of mother Elena.
In recent years, the winery has been completely renewed and adapted to the most modern technologies to obtain quality wines.
Soft presses to get sweet and precious must, small steel tanks with temperature control to enhance and to better preserve the aroma of wines, small autoclaves for the production of special and peculiar sparkling wines, ultimate generation vinificators to extract from red grapes intense color and tannins, oak barrels to give the wine aromas and unique features, a modern bottling line, finally, to capture all this in a precious bottle.
However, all the efforts made in the winery are made with the specific task of assisting in the best way what nature gives us in the vineyard.
